Resolving microbial microdiversity with high accuracy full length 16S rRNA Illumina sequencing

Abstract

We describe a method for sequencing full-length 16S rRNA gene amplicons using the high throughput Illumina MiSeq platform. The resulting sequences have about 100-fold higher accuracy than standard Illumina reads and are chimera filtered using information from a single molecule dual tagging scheme that boosts the signal available for chimera detection. We demonstrate that the data provides fine scale phylogenetic resolution not available from Illumina amplicon methods targeting smaller variable regions of the 16S rRNA gene.